Sunday July 12, 2020; 10:17 AM EDT
- There's a great scene in the movie Monster where the lead character interviews for a job in a local bank. She's had a hard life, no job history or résumé. The bank officer explains: #
- "When the beach party is over you don't get to say, you know what, I think now I'd like to have what everyone else has worked their entire life for. It doesn't work that way."#
- That's the speech the virus is giving to the Republican governors of Texas, Florida, Arizona and all the other states that are collapsing under the weight of the virus after re-opening before they did the hard work of getting the virus under control. #
- The predictable thing happened. The pandemic exploded. #
- The analogy to the main character of Monster is pretty close to perfect. The governors may have been naïve, as she was, but life doesn't care about that. You have to pay the price before you get the prize.#
- The plan#
- First there's no question the schools will not open in the fall. #
- We should stop discussing it. It's out of the question. What may happen is they will try to open the schools in a few of the Republican states, and close them within a few days as the rate of infection goes even higher. Cause and effect. You do something stupid and a week later the infections go up, two weeks later the hospitalizations go up and two weeks after that, the death rate goes up. #
- In this dimension the virus is totally predictable. Opening the schools in a month, with such a high density of infections, is suicidal on both the individual and societal level. #
- Here's the plan we would be executing now if we had competent management. I'm not inventing this, it's the protocol they used in China, Vietnam, Singapore, New York, basically everywhere, to defeat the virus. This was a known method back in March. I first heard about it on the Daily podcast. #
- Nationwide lockdown until the rate of new cases is flat and near the baseline. #
- Meanwhile stand up national testing and contact tracing. Open source the data so the public can help analyze it. Also useful for teaching the kids, at home, what's going on.#
- Create a network of places to isolate newly infected Americans. Hotels, convention centers, college dorms, schools. #
- Once all that has happened we can open the schools.#
- Florida#
- How bad is it out there? Leah in the Florida panhandle writes, "Any state whose residents keep coming to Florida on vacation will keep getting a taste of it. We’re having our busiest tourist season ever this summer. No masks. No social distancing. A fresh batch comes every Saturday to stay a week. Here’s Publix Watercolor, always packed."#
- Bottom line: Until you go through the pain, then the hard work of containing the virus, it's suicidal to re-open the schools. Even if the government tells us we have to commit suicide, the people won't do it. We will learn. The disaster will explode, but we will learn.#
- Meanwhile teach the kids at home that they're living the consequences of having a poorly educated electorate. Help them study the math and science of viral infections. And study the history, as it's happening.#
